Walkout to commemorate Columbine High shooting

Shots ripped through the nation’s consciousness at Columbine High School 19 years ago Friday — before most of this year’s high school graduates were even born.

Now the self-named “mass shooting generation” plans to walk out of school to commemorate that dark day, and to protest about how little has changed. Two students murdered 13 victims before killing themselves.

Across the nation and the state, 2,400 events are planned, including dozens in South Florida, many of them concentrated around the current epicenter of shock and horror wrought by a semi-automatic weapon: Parkland.

The walkout was conceived Feb. 14, hours after bullets shattered Marjory Stoneman Doug- las High School, leaving 17 dead and 17 more hurt, said Lane Murdock, a 16-year-old sophomore at Ridgefield High School in Connecticut.

“I’ve been so inspired by the MSD students, they are the leaders and the heroes of our generation,” said Murdock, who’s been getting some help from Change.org and Indivisible, a grass-roots resistance organization. “We’re not going to hope and wish anymore. We’re going to demand.”

Ryan Deitsch, 18, a Stoneman Douglas High senior, who is among the #NeverAgain student activists at the Parkland school, said he’s glad to see demonstrations for sensible gun laws continue — independent of his group’s organizing.

“We’ve been dealing with this for 19 years,” he said, explaining how he’s going to be